World of Gor

...I could see, high on the map, Ax Glacier, Torvaldsland, and Hunjer and Skjern, and Helmutsport, and, lower, Kassau and the great green forests, and the river Laurius, and Laura and Lydius, and, lower, the islands, prominent among them Cos and Tyros; I saw the delta of the Vosk, and Port Kar, and, inland, Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning, and Thentis, in the mountains of Thentis, famed for her tarn flocks; and, to the south, among many other cities, Tharna, of the vast silver mines; I saw the Voltai Range, and Glorious Ar, and the Cartius, and, far to the south, Turia, and near the shore of Thassa, the islands of Anango and Ianda, and on the coast, the free ports of Schendi and Bazi. There were, on this map, hundreds of cities, and promontories and peninsulas, and rivers and inland lakes and seas.
--Tribesmen of Gor, 1:7

I shrugged. Much of Gor was terra incognita. Few knew well the lands on the east of the Voltai and Thentis ranges, for example, or what lay west of the farther islands, near Cos and Tyros. It was more irritating, of course, to realize that even considerable areas of territory above Schendi, south of the Vosk, and west of Ar, were unknown.
---Explorers of Gor, 1:16

Lands and Landmarks

POLAR PLAINS -- Plains of tundra land which extend for thousands of pasangs wide and hundreds deep, over the Northern cap of the planet.

Four days after leaving the northern edge of Ax Glacier, we climbed to the height of the pass of Tancred, the mountains of the Hrimgar flanking us on either side. Below the height, the pass sloping downward, we could see the tundra of the polar plain. It is thousands of pasangs in width, and hundreds in depth; it extends, beyond horizons we could see, to the southern edge of the northern, or polar, sea.
---Beasts of Gor, 12:192

AXE GLACIER -- A huge glacier which sits to the east of Torvaldsland between two mountains and toward the sea.

...Ax Glacier was far to the north, a glacier spilling between two mountains of stone, taking in its path to the sea, spreading, the form of an ax. The men of the country of Ax Glacier fish for whales and hunt snow sleen. They cannot farm that far to the north. Thorgeir, it so happened, of course, was the only man of the Ax Glacier country, which is usually taken as the northern border of Torvaldsland, before the ice belts of Gor's arctic north, who was at the Thing-Fair.
---Marauders of Gor, 10:139

TORVALDSLAND -- Northern land of rocks, cliffs, mountains and lands fed by the stream of Torvald. Its citizens are known for their harsh ways, their skills as sailors and fishermen and their worship of Odin. The area known as Torvaldsland lines the icy shores of Thassa and pushes its belt of cliffs and rocks eastward between Kassau to the polar region which is home to the Red Hunters.

...Torvaldsland is a cruel, harsh, rocky land. It contains many cliffs, inlets and mountains. Its arable soil is thin, and found in patches. The size of the average farm is very small. Good soil is rare and highly prized. Communication between farms is often by sea, in small boats. Without the stream of Torvald, it would probably be impossible to raise cereal crops in sufficient quantity to feed even its relatively sparse population... The stream of Torvald is regarded by the men of Torvaldsland as a gift of Thor, bestowed upon Torvald, the legendary founder and hero of the land, in exchange for a ring of gold....
---Marauders of Gor, 4:55-56

I had heard of this stone. It is taken by many to mark the border between Torvaldsland and the south. Many of those of Torvaldsland, however take its borders to be much farther extended than the Torvaldsmark. Indeed, some of the men of Torvaldsland regard Torvaldsland to be wherever their ships beach, as they took their country, and their steel, with them.
---Marauders of Gor, 3:45

NORTHERN FOREST -- Large forest area to the north of the Laurius River which spreads thousands of pasangs wide and across Gor, from the shores of Thassa to so far east that its eastern edge is said to be unexplored. The northern forest is home to numerous varieties of trees, of which the most formidable is said to be the Tur trees of giant proportions.

...The northern forests, the haunts of bandits and unusual beasts, far to the north and east of Ko-ro-ba, my city, are magnificent, deep forests, covering hundreds of thousands of square pasangs....
---Assassin of Gor, 19:293-294

The forests of the northern temperate latitudes of Gor are countries in themselves, covering hundreds of thousands of square pasangs of area....

...It is not known how far these forests extend. It is not impossible that they belt the land surfaces of the planet. They begin near the shores of Thassa, the Sea, in the west. How far they extend to the east is not known. They do extend beyond the most northern ridges of the Thentis Mountains.
---Captive of Gor, 9:129

WOODS OF CLEARCHUS -- Forest area 200 pasangs west of the Sardar Mountains, named after a famous brigand who once ruled the area. Although Clearchus was successfully chased out of the area, the Woods of Clearchus remain a haunt of brigands.

As rumor has it, Clearchus was a famous brigand of some two centuries ago who decided to legitimize and regularize his brigandage. He proclaimed his area of operations a ubarate, proclaimed himself its ubar, and then proceeded to impose taxes and levy tolls. Interestingly enough, in time, several cities accorded this ubarate diplomatic recognition, generally in return for concessions on the taxes and tolls. Finally a large force of mercenaries, in the hire of the merchant caste, in a campaign that lasted several months, put an end to the spurious reign of Clearchus, driving him from the forest and scattering his men....
---Players of Gor, 4:100

SWAMP FOREST -- Home to rational beings called 'Swamp Spiders', these lands of swamp forest would appear to form a somewhat incomplete belt around the City State of Ar, as they are in turn mentioned to be both to the north and to the south of Ar.

The third day's camp was made in the swamp forest that borders the city of Ar on the north. I had chosen this area because it is the most uninhabitable area within tarn strike of Ar....
---Tarnsman of Gor, 5:74

...I remembered her as I had seen her, in the swamp forest, south of Ar, with Nar the spider...
---Captive of Gor, 18:368

VOSK DELTA -- An area of swampland containing myriads of shallow channels which spread for thousands of square pasangs over the west edge of the Vosk, where it falls into Thassa. The Vosk's Delta is home to the Rencers, tribes of men and women whose lives are intricately woven with the rence plant, indigenous to this area.

...Never has a slave girl escaped from canaled Port Kar, protected on one side by the interminable, rush-grown delta of the Vosk, on the other by the broad tides of the Tamber Gulf, and beyond it, the vast, blue, gleaming, perilous Thassa....
---Assassin of Gor, 19:305

On river barges, for hundreds of pasangs, I had made my way down the Vosk, but where the mighty Vosk began to break apart and spread into its hundreds of shallow, constantly shifting channels, becoming lost in the vast tidal marshes of its delta, moving toward gleaming Thassa, the Sea, I had abandoned the barges, purchasing from rence growers on the eastern periphery of the delta supplies and the small rush craft which I now propelled through the rushes and sedge, the wild rence plants.
---Raiders of Gor, 1:5

FIELDS OF HESIUS -- East of Argentum and west of Corcyrus.

HILLS AND PLAINS OF ETEOCLES -- An area located 100 pasangs from the Issus, to the south and west of Corcyrus.

"Did your troops enter Argentum?" I asked.
"Our generals did not feel it was necessary," said Ligurious.
"It seems that our first victory, after the seizure of the mines, occurred on the Fields of Hesius," I said.
"Yes," said Ligurious.
"Our second occurred on the shores of Lake Ias," I said, "and our third east of the Issus." This was a northwestward-flowing river, tributary to the Vosk, far to the north.
"Yes, my Tatrix," said Ligurious.
"Now we have been victorious once more," I said, "this time on the Plains of Eteocles."
"Yes, my Tatrix," said Ligurious.
"They lie within a hundred pasangs of Corcyrus," I said.
---Kajira of Gor, 9:158-159

BARRENS -- Vast tracks of rolling grasslands lying east of the Thentis mountains and home to tribes of Red Savages.

At the edge of the Thentis mountains, in the driest areas, the grass is short. As one moves in an easterly direction it becomes taller, ranging generally from ten to eighteen inches in height; as one moves even further east it can attain a height of several feet, reaching as high as the knees of a man riding a kaiila. On foot, it is easier to become lost in such grass than in the northern forests. No white man, incidentally, at least as far as I know, has ever penetrated to the eastern edge of the Barrens. Certainly, as far as I know, none has ever returned from that area. Their extent, accordingly, is not known.
---Savages of Gor, 2:65

VEN HIGHLANDS -- Highlands which drain through 6 cataracts into the Thassa Cartius. These lands are home to ferocious river tribes which are largely responsible for these areas remaining unexplored.

"...The actual source of the tributary to the Vosk, now called the Thassa Cartius, as you know, was found five years later by the explorer, Ramus of Tabor, who, with a small expedition, over a period of nine months, fought and bartered his way through the river tribes, beyond the six cataracts, to the Ven highlands. The Thassa Cartius, with its own tributaries, drains the highlands and the descending plains."
---Explorers of Gor, 1:16

RAINFORESTS OF THE EQUATOR -- Inland of Schendi, surrounding the great equatorial lakes of Ushindi, Ngao and Shaba, is a land rich in palms and colorful birds that resembles the rainforests of Earth. The Schendi jungles extend from the shores of Thassa over the equator for thousands of pasangs. Much of the northern portion of these forests remains terra incognita.

"The rain forests closed the Cartius proper for most civilized persons from the south," I said, "and what trading took place tended to be confined to the ubarates of the southern shore of Lake Ushindi...."
---Explorers of Gor, 1:17

EQUATORIAL SWAMP LANDS -- Areas of thick swamp and marshland which surround and separate the equatorial lakes.

"To the west of Lake Ushindi," I said, "there are floodlands, marshes and bogs, through which a considerable amount of water drains into the lake. With considerable hardship, limiting himself to forty men, and temporarily abandoning all but two boats, which were half dragged and thrust through the marshes eastward, after two months, Shaba reached the western shore of what we now know as Lake Ngao."
---Explorers of Gor, 1:18

SCHENDI POINT -- The peninsula on which is located Schendi, 200 pasangs south of Schendi Harbor.

...We could see the shore now, with its sands and, behind the sand, the dense, green vegetation, junglelike, broken by occasional clearings for fields and villages. Schendi itself lay farther to the south, about the outjutting of a small peninsula, Point Schendi....
---Explorers of Gor, 6:104

ANCIENT CITY OF LAKE SHABA -- Ruins of an ancient city found at the mouth of Lake Shaba, the third great equatorial lake of the Schendi area.

Here and there, emerging from the lake, were great stone figures, the torsos and heads of men, shields upon their arms, spears grasped in their hands. These great figures were weathered, and covered with the patinas of age, greenish and red. Lichens and mosses grew in patches on the stone; vines clambered about them. Birds perched on the heads and shoulders of the great figures. On ridgework near the water turtles and tharlarion sunned themselves.
"How ancient are these things?" asked Janice.
"I do not know," I said.
I looked at the huge figures. They towered thirty and forty feet out of the water. Our canoe seemed small, moving among them. I studied the faces.
"These men were of your race, or of some race akin to yours, Kisu," I said.
"Perhaps," said Kisu. "There are many black peoples."
"Where have the builders of these things gone?" asked Ayari.
"I do not know," I said.
---Explorers of Gor, 50:417-418

TAHARI DESERT -- The desert land nestled in the eastern crook of the Voltai range. More akin to Earth's Sahara, the Tahari is a harsh dry land in which tribes of raiding nomads make their home. Shaped in the form of a giant trapezoid leaning to the east, the desert extends hundreds of pasangs wide and thousands deep.

I looked downward. Though on the map it occupied only some several feet of the floor, in actuality it was vast. It was roughly in the shape of a gigantic, lengthy trapezoid

Even in the reduced scale of the map the desert seemed vast. Its mere representation, as earlier indicated, covered several square feet of the floor. It was roughly in the shape of a gigantic, lengthy trapezoid, with eastward leaning sides. At its northwestern corner lay Tor. West of Tor, on the Lower Fayeen, a sluggish, meandering tributary, like the Upper Fayeen, to the Cartius, lay the river port of Kasra, known for its export of salt....

The area, in extent, east of Tor, was hundreds of pasangs in depth, and perhaps thousands in length. The Gorean expression for this area simply means the Wastes, or the Emptiness. It is a vast area, and generally rocky, and hilly, save in the dune country. It is almost constantly windblown and almost waterless. In areas it has been centuries between rains. Its oases are fed from underground rivers flowing southeastward from the Voltai slopes.
---Tribesmen of Gor, 1:32-33

KASBAH OF THE GUARD OF DUNES -- The secretly located Kasbah of the Salt Ubar, highest in the salt trade of the Tahari, is said to be somewhere east of the Oasis of the Battle of Red Rock and northwest of Klima.

"It can be only," said Hassan, "the kasbah of the Guard of the Dunes."
"That of the Salt Ubar?" I asked.
"That," agreed Hassan. I had heard of the Salt Ubar, or the Guard of the Dunes. The location of his kasbah is secret. Probably, other than his own men, only some few hundred know of it, primarily merchants high in the salt trade, and few of them would know its exact location.
---Tribesmen of Gor, 13:207-208

KLIMA -- Salt mines of the Tahari desert said to be 1000 pasangs from civilization, Klima was used as a type of penal system where the salt Ubar sent all who were found guilty of crimes to serve as slaves. Following the fall of Abdul, however, Klima went on to become more of a City ruled by its own.
(See Klima feature page)

In the distance, below, perhaps five pasangs away, in the hot, concave, white salt bleakness, like a vast, white, shallow bowl, pasangs wide, there were compounds, low, white buildings of mud brick, plastered. There were many of them. They were hard to see in the distance, in the light, but I could make them out.
"Klima," said Hamid.
---Tribesmen of Gor, 14:235

PLAINS OF TURIA -- The southern plains of Gor located below the Thassa Cartius. They spread for thousands of pasangs between the Ta-Thassa Mountains and the southernmost foothills of the Voltai range.

The Wagon Peoples claimed the southern prairies of Gor, from gleaming Thassa and the mountains of Ta-Thassa to the southern foothills of the Voltai Range itself, that reared in the crust of Gor like the backbone of a planet. On the north they claimed lands even to the rush-grown banks of the Cartius, a broad, swift flowing tributary feeding into the incomparable Vosk. The land between the Cartius and the Vosk had once been within the borders of the claimed empire of Ar, but not even Marlenus, Ubar of Ubars, when master of luxurious, glorious Ar, had flown his tarnsmen south of the Cartius.
---Nomads of Gor, 1:2

MISC. LANDMARKS -- The reader stumbles over many areas in the trek through the Counter Earth, and is often given little information on the exact location of some of them. Ka-la-na orchards and Sa-Tarna fields as well as numerous peasant villages will be mentioned, fields, plains and meadows which line the City State surroundings. Among them such places as Kiebel Hill, Gordon Heights, the fields of Piedmont and Cardonicus, the Plains of Sanchez and numerous mountain passes such as the Tancred or Teveh Pass.

Dietrich of Tamburg, of the high city of Tarnburg, some two hundred pasangs to the north and west of Hochburg, both substantially mountain fortresses, both in the more southern and civilized ranges of the Voltai, was well-known to the warriors of Gor. His name was almost a legend. It was he who had won the day on the fields of both Piedmont and Cardonicus, who had led the Forty Days' March, relieving the siege of Talmont, who had effected the crossing of the Issus in 10,122 C.A., in the night evacuation of Keibel Hill, when I had been in Torvaldsland, and who had been the victor in the battles of Rovere, Kargash, Edgington, Teveh Pass, Gordon Heights, and the Plains of Sanchez. His campaigns were studied in all the war schools of the high cities. I knew him from scrolls I had studied years ago in Ko-ro-ba, and from volumes in my library in Port Kar, such as the commentaries of Minicius and the anonymous analyses of "The Diaries," sometimes attributed to the military historian, Carl Commenius, of Argentum, rumored to have once been a mercenary himself.
---Mercenaries of Gor, 2:31-32

Mountains (from north to south)

HRIMGAR MOUNTAINS -- Tiers of interlaced chains of mountains both to the north and east of Torvaldsland, bordering the polar plains, and penetrated by several passes through which trek migrating herds. Hrimgar is the Gorean word for 'barrier'.

...The Hrimgar Mountains are not as rugged or formidable as any of these chains, and they are penetrated by numerous passes. One such pass, through which we trekked, is called the pass of Tancred, because it is the pass used annually by the migration of the herd of Tancred.
Four days after leaving the northern edge of Ax Glacier, we climbed to the height of the pass of Tancred, the mountains of the Hrimgar flanking us on either side. Below the height, the pass sloping downward, we could see the tundra of the polar plain. It is thousands of pasangs in width, and hundreds in depth; it extends, beyond horizons we could see, to the southern edge of the northern, or polar, sea.
---Beasts of Gor, 12:192

TORVALDSBERG -- The large spear-blade shaped peak of Torvaldsland, more than four and a half pasangs high, home to the sleeping cave of the legendary Torvald.

In leaving the Thing-Field I saw, in the distance, a high, snow-capped mountain, steep, sharp, almost like the blade of a bent spear.
I had seen it at various times, but never so clearly as from the Thing-Field. I suppose the Thing-Field might, partly, have been selected for the aspect of this mountain. It was a remarkable peak.
"What mountain is that?" I asked.
"It is the Torvaldsberg," said Ivar Forkbeard.
---Marauders of Gor, 11:180

The Torvaldsberg is, all things considered, an extremely dangerous mountain. Yet it is clearly not unscalable, as I learned, without equipment. It has the shape of a spear blade, broad, which has been bent near the tip. It is something over four and a half pasangs in height, or something over seventeen thousand Earth feet. It is not the highest mountain on Gor but it is one of the most dramatic, and most impressive. It is also, in its fearful way, beautiful.
---Marauders of Gor, 15:220-221

MOUNTAINS OF THENTIS-- Mountain range which lies on the northeast border of explored Gor, said to be north of the Voltai and beyond which lays the Barren lands inhabited by the tribes of Red Savages. Home to the city which bears its name, the Mountains of Thentis are famed for their flocks of wild tarns, and the production of black wine, the beans of which are grown on its slopes.

VOLTAI MOUNTAINS -- The 'spine of the continent' which draws the eastern border of known Gor. The Voltai range rises and spreads southward from northeast of Ar to the northern limits of the Tahari.

SARDAR MOUNTAINS -- South of the Vosk and west of the Voltai, and 1000 pasangs from Ko-Ro-Ba, these black mountains are the home of the beings known as Priest-Kings.

'The Priest-Kings,' said my father, 'maintain the Sacred Place in the Sardar Mountains, a wild vastness into which no man penetrates. The Sacred Place, to the minds of most men here, is taboo, perilous. Surely none have returned from those mountains.'
---Tarnsman of Gor, 2:29-30

TA-THASSA MOUNTAINS -- The large mountains which border the southern plains of known Gor, said to be at the shores of Thassa.

...before what, I asked myself, would even the black larl flee; and I asked myself how far it had been driven; perhaps even from the mountains of Ta-Thassa, that loomed in this hemisphere, Gor's southern, at the shore of Thassa, the sea, said to be in the myths without a farther shore.
---Nomads of Gor, 1:2